Only valid for active forum users. Active means at least 30 postings within the last 30 days (no spam postings). This will automatically being checked at www.starbike.com shopping basket so make sure that you are logged in at the WW board!If there does not appear a WW discount position when you check out you do not have enough postings!

i disagree. this is exactly what he should've said at the very beginning of the USADA's investigation into him (or at least at the point he knew he's going down..). contrary to the Oprah interview i find it hard to disagree with his statements, especially as he sounds more as someone who's trying to make peace with himself.

i'd love other pro's who mean/ meant something in the peloton to come out and admitt their sins as well, whether through the TRC panel or just some kind of statement. call me naive but i keep my fingers crossed

one's ex ante belief is not a "fact" that weighs equally with evidence. at best, it's a presumption to be overcome (if it has some basis); at worst, it's a bias. (here, since the person admitted doping 7 times earlier, if there were to be any presumption at all it would be the other way.)

in any event, you can't multiply belief times evidence and get a rational result. thus, if I believe my business partner wouldn't steal from me and I find that he is making weekly unaccounted for withdrawals and depositing the money in an offshore account, I don't say "OK, so now there's a fifty-fifty chance he's a crook."

"I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones." -- John Cage

"My generation was no different than any other. The 'help' has evolved over the years but the fact remains that our sport is damn hard, the Tour was invented as a 'stunt, and very tough mother f**kers have competed for a century and all looked for advantages. From hopping on trains a 100 years ago to EPO now. No generation was exempt or 'clean'. Not Merckx's, not Hinault's, not LeMond's, not Coppi's, not Gimondi's, not Indurain's, not Anquetil's, not Bartali's, and not mine."

I have no respect for Armstrong but sadly this comment has some truth to it...Except i doubt that La Francaise had "Help" from italian doctors

Let's not bring xenophobia into this. I'm sure Armstrong would have been perfectly happy getting doping assistance from Frenchmen or Americans, if they had been the best in the business. Armstrong procured help in cheating purely on meritocracy.

swinter wrote:I don't know if that was nerdy, basilic, or just meaningless.

yeah, probably a fail. I was just trying to explain why people have such diverging opinions even after objective evidence has come in. Prior beliefs - whatever their basis is - is why. If you are a true believer then it's hard to change what you think - it's not evidence of insanity, it can be explained (even without getting into the psychological difficulty in admitting that one is wrong, esp online...)

swinter wrote:in any event, you can't multiply belief times evidence and get a rational result.

Actually you can (smarter people than me who do Bayesian statistics could prove it). Eg in medicine. If a person on the straight and narrow wants to give blood and their HIV test comes back positive, it's still very likely that that is a false positive, evn though the test is very good. Their prior probability of HIV is just too low.

@basilic -- as to your first point, we know that people have very strong confirmation biases. they filter out what is inconsistent with their beliefs and concentrate on the parts that confirm those beliefs. a more rational person, though, tries to evaluate the evidence and, also, test his or her beliefs against it. alas, there is little premium on this kind of rationality in our society anymore.

as to your second point, it's apples and oranges. the odds that a positive test is false (or a false, positive) can be figured with Bayesian analysis. but prior probability of an infection is a fact, amenable to statistical evaluation. a belief (so-and-so is innocent) is not a fact. it can be based on facts, but the Bayesian analysis would have to be done using the probability of those facts.

if the belief that so-and-so is innocent is based on the fact that they haven't committed the crime in the past, then the probability of that belief being true is extremely low because prior conduct is not terribly predictive. (indeed, it's generally inadmissible as evidence in court except under some very specific circumstances.) if the belief is based on the fact that their sports hero has denied doping for years, then it's not worth much at all -- especially in cycling. (kind of the reverse of your HIV hypothetical, given the incidence of doping in the sport.)

circling back to my first point: one of the problems in our culture is that so many people treat their beliefs as fact. that's one of the reasons our politics is so f*cked up. some people believe markets always work. (some times they do; sometimes they don't -- as in 2008.) some people believe that women's bodies have ways of shutting down pregnancy in the case of rape.

you get the point.

"I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones." -- John Cage